from the mundane to the mundane and back again

In line at Foodtown, woman in front of me sees the kid bag up her stuff in plastic bags and doesn’t say anything until she goes to pick up her groceries. She dumped her stuff out and crumpled up the bags.I don’t want plastic bags!..no!…no!…no plastic bags!….NO!
She scooped the groceries in her arms and stormed out
The kid staring, non blinkingJeez, I guess she doesn’t like plastic bags
The kid, snaps back to lifeHorseflies…the horseflies, they’re everywhere…in my beard…in my eyes…horseflies in my ears
He’s darting his index finger around to show the path of the horseflies. I see no flies, horse or otherwise.Horseflies huhThey’re everywhere…they followed me from the baseball field…the morning they’re out there…afternoon…in here……………do you want to donate a dollar to the Boy Scouts?Uh…no thanks…I donated a couple of days agoOh…well you have to the end of the month to donate……….$27.45………….my friends putting their cd out tomorrow…maybe they’ll let me sing…and somebody’ll film it…and it’ll go viral…
I swiped my card to payYeah..well…I guess that’s the dream innit…good luckYeaaah

Went to Foodtown the other night for some supplies, which included apples. Their apples were terrible, like red balloons full of mush. So I headed over to Whole Foods, Bought the stuff I needed, (the Pink Lady apples were pretty good) and headed to the checkout. There was one woman ahead of me, the checkout conveyer wasn’t full of food so I figured it wouldn’t be long and I plopped my groceries down. I ran into my brother-in-law there, he was in the next checkout line and we were shooting the shit about comic books and other world altering stuff. His line which had many people on it was moving quickly and I realized that mine hadn’t moved at all. I looked and there was the same amount of groceries from the woman in front still on the conveyer. I didn’t know what was going on until I saw the woman still had a full cart of food but was deciding on each piece of food before she put it on the conveyer. She was adding another step to the drudgery of shopping. Instead of what most people do which would be “Hey, I want 6 apples. These look good.”, she had bags of produce and then was thinning the herd at the counter. “I only want these three tomatoes, I don’t want the other two”,“mmmmm Yeah I don’t want this celery….wait wait…I take that back but I don’t want this one.” This went on for a long time, Dave had finished checking out and came over, we were exchanging some “WTF” looks, I’d never seen anything like it. Finally somebody came over from customer service and offered to ring me up at the customer service desk, and the long national nightmare was over.”

Whenever I see Pink Lady apples, I’m reminded of an 1980’s variety show called Pink Lady & Jeff. I don’t really remember the show but I remember the title was used as a punch line by some late night TV hosts

We (my wife) are hosting Thanksgiving this year, it’s mostly her family as there’s not much left of mine. I’m not usually around for Thanksgiving so I’m just trying to stay out of the way and and shrink my trash footprint. Which is like a carbon footprint but on a household level, with records, books, and miscellaneous garbage instead of carbon . We got enough bonus points at Foodtown to get a turkey, which is great. We went to Foodtown together (a rare occurrence) I parked our cart which had food in it and we went and analyzed a bunch of frozen turkeys. Before I could stop her, Carrie asked a Foodtown employee his opinion. I’ve had some interaction with this guy, he’s really nice but he’s pretty intense about his opinions. One really big turkey, one kind of big turkey and and extra breast, two smaller turkeys if there’s a lot of leg and wing aficionado’s, size of leftovers. Way too many options. I went to get other stuff we needed but my cart was in the process of being taken away, like it was being towed.“Hey man, that’s my cart”
-slack jawed stare-“Yeah, that’s my cart..there’s food in it”“…oh”
and he kept going, slower but still going“sorry, I still need it”
I calmly wrestled it out of his hands and went to get towels. As I was zipping down towards paper goods, I saw this woman in front of me and she was weaving slowly down the aisle. I needed to get by her. Like a great running back I saw three moves ahead of me, getting by her and grabbing the towels but like a shitty running back, I didn’t pay attention to my first move and ran the cart into a shelf knocking off a bunch of toilet paper and earning me a glare from the slow weaver. I finally got back to the frozen turkeys where Carrie was being diplomatic“I really think this one will be fine”
“I don’t know, I think you should get at least an extra breast.”“Well..”
“You’re making a mistake”
We grabbed our turkey and headed towards the checkout…and freedom.

I had to go to Foodtown after work. I was in a rush because I wanted to get home to see how the Mets were going to lose another game. Included in the shopping list were a bunch of Vitamin Waters, they were on sale so I bought a bunch. There were two registers open, an express 10 Items or Less and a normal register. There was a family who looked like they were stocking up for the coming apocalypse so I went to the express lane. I had a lot more than ten items but less than bomb shelter stock up and there was nobody else, so I figured why not. As soon as I put all the items down and the cashier gave me a “I know there’s more than ten items” smirk, a woman got in line with one carton of milk. The cashier gave her a “Get a load of this asshole with more than ten items” look. I was the jerk but I didn’t really care because my needs as a Mets fan outweighed any unspoken societal contract with the rest of the world. I got all my bags and headed to the car. Yes, I still use plastic bags. We reuse them for cleaning up the Duchess’s leavings on her walks and I’m doing an extensive art project with them, a 70 foot tall bile duct made entirely of plastic bags and my dreams. I got to the car and was putting everything in the back seat and some of the vitamin waters fell out of the bag. Fuck! one went under the car and I was cursing and chasing down rolling bottles of vitamin water. I put them back in the bag and they fell out again. Augggghhhhh! Godfuckingdammitfuckfuckfuck! This happened ONE MORE TIME and then as the slowest man on the planet, I realized there was a hole in the side of the bag. I just threw the bottles in the back of the car and went home to watch the Mets lose.

Went to Foodtown, it was late, they were closing in twenty minutes. I’m not there two minutes when this old guy sidles up to me:“hey, you work at Jack’s, right?” (I’m wearing a Jack’s shirt)“…yeeeeaaaah…”“I gotta tell ya something…about two years ago I went in…I was lookin’ at the rap stuff…ya know all that anti-cop stuff…I wanted to see what they were sayin’…cause my uncle he was a detective..and I…I work with…ya know the law too. So I was lookin’ and one of the.. ya know security stickers was coverin’ the price…so I took it off to see what you guys were chargin’ for that anti-cop rap stuff…and this guy who works there thought I was stealin’ and I said I ain’t stealin’ my uncle was a detective…”
[He was now fumbling with his wallet and managed to drop everything out of it. Time is wasting and unless I disappear in a puff of smoke I’m fucked]“Look I have his I.D. right here…No that’s not it..uh….I must have left it home…but I got it…really.”“Look man, I don’t know what to tell you, I wasn’t there…whoever was working was just doing his job…and they’re closing up here and I got a bunch of shit I gotta buy.”“Yeah but I wasn’t stealin’…I’m in law enforcement…and my uncle…my uncle was a detective…”
I shrugged my shoulders and took off. I made a mad dash and got everything all the while looking around my law enforcement friend. I made it to the paper goods aisle where I was picking up some paper towels and I heard“loook…I still got the receipts from that day…I didn’t steal nothin’…”“Ok..you got receipts…and…look man…this isn’t really the time or place for this…”“Yeah but..”
I fled before he could continue, or maybe he did continue but I was out of earshot and even though I had more then the suggested 10 items I figured my need (to flee the golem) gave me the right to flaunt shopping market etiquette. I got out without seeing him again.

I went to Foodtown a couple of nights ago, paid with my bankcard and got $15 cash back. I didn’t realize it but the $5 and the $10 had what I think (hope) was a bit of gum on them. Really tiny but enough to have them stuck together. I didn’t find this out until I was on line at Starbucks on Saturday. ICK! they’re stuck together. I didn’t want to pay for the coffee with sticky money because I didn’t want to be known as the guy who paid with sticky money.“you know that guy from Jacks, well he paid this morning with a five that was sticky.”“Ewww…throw it out.”“I did”
Then I was going to switch it out from the register at work but if the money is sticky, it might stick to other money in the drawer and we’d give out too much change and the drawer would be short and I’d be fired and then I’d have to live under a bridge somewhere like a troll. So that was out. So I figured, wash the money. I sprayed it with Windex my go to clean anything savior (from counter tops to small cuts and everything in between). It didn’t take off the gum, just spread it around a bit so it was actually more sticky. Fuck! so I went with hand sanitizer, because why not. I spread the bills out on the back counter drenched them in hand sanitizer and wiped them down with a paper towel, as I was doing this, Jack (the owner) walked byJack-What are you doing?Me-Washing money (like it was the most obvious thing in the world)
Jack-(looked at me, at the money and back at me )……oh…He started to say something thought better of it and walked away. The hand sanitizer didn’t work, so I just figured out the parts of the bills that were sticky and put clear tape over them. Another signpost on my descent into senility.

Went to Foodtown to grab some stuff, not a lot. Enough to get into the “About 20 items or less” line. As I was making a bee line for the register, a woman with a cart darted in front of me and beat me to the line and then jumped in front of her cart to pull it in to the register line/cattle chute instead of the normal push. unfortunately in her haste she came in at an odd angle and it was stuck. This would have been ok if she was pushing the cart but pulling it, not so good. So, me being chivalrous and wanting to move things along. “Here, let me help”. I had my basket in my right hand, so I went to lift the cart and move it with my left hand. I grabbed it in such a way that my hand appeared palsied. The woman looked at my hand and made a lemon face (“that big crippled man tried to help me. It was nice, he failed but it was nice”). So I swung the cart over but went too far and smashed it into the candy rack, knocking a bunch of candy onto the floor. I felt like Lennie from Of Mice and Men. The cart was straightened out enough to move through and I took my time picking up the fallen candy as to not look at the woman with the cart.